Op-Ed: How the new-old Formosa makes L.A. history

I like a bar with history. In Los Angeles, that means Musso & Frank, where Fitzgerald and Faulkner drank, along with Raymond Chandler, Carey McWilliams, and James M. Cain. Or the now-defunct Coronet, once connected to the theater on La Cienega where Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton premiered the English-language version of “Galileo” in 1947.

I also have a soft spot for the Formosa, which opened in 1925 across the street from the old Pickford-Fairbanks Studios in what is now West Hollywood. Unlike Musso’s, the Formosa was not frequented by writers in particular; its patrons included Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Bugsy Siegel and Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, who may or may not have been seen there prior to her grisly murder.

The bar was iconic enough to be featured in Curtis Hanson’s 1997 movie, “L.A. Confidential,” which is, among other things, a visual love letter to the city at mid-century. And yet, since 1991, the Formosa has had a difficult time of it — first threatened with demolition, then diminished in a 2015 renovation that reworked its black-and-red interior into something contemporary and bland. It was sad but not surprising when it closed, abruptly, at the end of 2016.

Now the Formosa is coming back. Earlier this year, the 1933 Group, a developer known for restoring vintage properties, announced it would return the bar to its former glory and reopen in 2018. The idea is to retrofit the interior more or less as it was from the 1950s until the failed renovation, using photographs and memorabilia saved by the former owner.

This is something of a victory for history, and the often fleeting life of local landmarks. For my money — or the developer’s — it’s also a welcome sign of Los Angeles growing up.

Los Angeles has long been denigrated for what it has destroyed rather than what it has preserved. The Red Car; the Victorians on Bunker Hill; the Brown Derby (the site now houses a shopping center called Brown Derby Plaza); and more recently, the Ambassador Hotel and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium.

Yet as early as 1962 — three years before New York passed its Landmarks Preservation Law — the city enacted the Cultural Heritage Ordinance, which mandates the designation “as Historic-Cultural Monuments any building, structure, or site important to the development and preservation of the history of Los Angeles, the state, and the nation.” Sixteen years later, the nonprofit Los Angeles Conservancy was created to help in the successful fight to save downtown’s Central Library.

The record of intent versus action is contradictory. But cities, not unlike their residents, are full of contradictions, and these days, preservationists are claiming their share of victories. Some see this as pushback against the pace of change — gentrification, a more vertical city, too much traffic. But I see it through a different lens: as a desire for roots, a kind of civic self-awareness, even a maturing sense of place. Los Angeles, in other words, has come into its own enough to think hard about, to care about, its past.

In recent years, structures including St. Vibiana’s (slated for demolition after it was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake) and Glendale’s Alex Theatre have not only been saved but rewoven into civic life. Angels Flight has been resurrected multiple times by fans and benefactors.

Before the renovation that unraveled the Formosa, it too — or its exterior, anyway — had been given landmark status by the city of West Hollywood. As for the erased interior, the rules are lenient about what happens inside an historic structure as long as the facade remains intact.

The bar’s next iteration can’t be more than a facsimile, but that’s similar to much of our “preserved” history. Angels Flight now stands half a block south of its original location. The Eastern Columbia Building, landmarked in 1985 and the most beautiful structure in the city, has been reconfigured inside as residential lofts. Clifton’s Cafeteria has been nicely reconstructed but it too stands as an adaptation as much as a restoration.

Such places are authentic and inauthentic at the same time — in Los Angeles, the line is often blurred. Just look at the new establishments that mirror the past without actually reflecting it: the Edison, a bar on the site of the city’s first private power plant, or Crane’s, built into an old bank vault on South Spring Street.

When the Formosa was in its heyday, Los Angeles was full of transplants for whom the city didn’t necessarily feel like home. The bar’s 2015 renovation failed for a variety of reasons but perhaps primarily because it didn’t take into account the way Los Angeles has changed. We want our history respected, we want to see that old city of displaced newcomers in the shape of the city we are building now: past and future together, Los Angeles as it is and as it was.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion.

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